


Y-Incision

by sayyikes



Category: Naruto
Genre: Autopsies incoming, Blonde people trying to wingman, Brooklyn Nine-Nine Meets Bones, Crack, F/M, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26611099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sayyikes/pseuds/sayyikes
Summary: Brooklyn Nine-Nine meets Bones meets Naruto------“Whatever this is with her, yeah,” The blond man interpreted. “It doesn’t even have to be, like, a romantic thing right away.”(Sasori eyed the bottle of hydrochloric acid on the shelf.)“—maybe, you’re just finally at the point where you’re ready to have *two* friends, yeah? Obviously I'm more than enough already! But that’s a bus factor of 1. Who’s gonna be there there to liven up your day if Kakuzu finally makes good on his promise to murder me?”
Relationships: Deidara & Yamanaka Ino, Deidara/Yamanaka Ino, Haruno Sakura & Sasori, Haruno Sakura/Sasori, Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 35
Kudos: 73





	1. Chapter 1

His half-lidded gaze lingered on the container in her arms. Sakura frowned. She moved the container an experimental inch to the right. The man's eyes followed. 

In a circle.   
In a square.  
 _Quickfaketotheleft._ Hmm.

 _Haunted-portrait futhermucker._ The pink-haired woman stewed, and turned away, putting as much of a barrier between her container and this creep as she could. 

What a disgracious, intrusive _dirtbag_. Had the gall to be interested in this stuff (her stuff!) after spending—what could very well have been the last moments of both their lives—insulting her. Her appearance. Her competence. The service level of her friggin’ MetroPass.

 _Well, too bad for him!_ Sakura thought self-righteously. Show-and-tell wasn’t for sociopathic men, who were arrogant, and rude, and skulked around like Dr. Caligari’s failed, red-headed Cesare-prototype. _Sucks to suck._ (Embarrassment always had a way of rendering her juvenile, and the memory of their earlier encounters scorched painfully with humiliation.)

There was movement from the container. A squirm. 

The slight motion made creepy dude peer down even more intensely. His fixation was keen and taut, a needle that hadn't been properly disposed of in the sharps bin. Sakura bared her teeth. But her warning snarl didn't faze him.

 _Can’t blame the weirdo for being intrigued_ _,_ She admitted reluctantly. _T_ _his stuff is pretty wicked._

(Yup. Let’s be real. Had someone schlepped a family-sized mayonnaise jar worth of bloodletting worms past her office, she’d have been bewitched, too.) 

Still. Today, she wasn’t the hungry onlooker. She was the schlepper. ( _No, gross, strike that. What evokes an Amazonian dominance? Possessor? Conductor? Ooh,_ _—e_ _xecutrix_.) Today she was the executrix. The one in charge of the situation. The one holding the control. And she could _with_ hold her super rad, mightily disgusting, amazing jar from whomsoever she chose. Current top of the blacklist: this dude.

 _Only..._ Sakura faltered. _He looks really...sad? Doomed? Consumptive?_

Argh.

Haruno Mebuki had raised a lady. It was her mother’s greatest triumph, and her own consummate failing. And a lady knew that when people were impolite to you, the best response was to (get an aluminum baseball bat) be the bigger person. Sakura could do this. She could throw jerk-face Raggedy-Ann a bone, just this once. ( _This is the last time, mom!_ She shook her fist heavenward. _My will is as strong as yours and my kingdom as great. You have no power over me!_ The beings inhabiting the astral plane waved their metaphysical hands. _Yeah, yeah.)_

Sakura harrumphed. 

“You want to see?” She offered begrudgingly. The olive branch squelched. 

He didn’t move. Sakura darkened. She had already determined to be magnanimous, he was just gonna have to deal with it.

With a grumble, she pushed the Gelfling/Skeksis lovechild— _like, he’s got nice eyelashes, but the whole rest of his manner is sideways_ —out of her path, and strode resolutely down the hall. _I’m Beauty and I’m Grace, I’m Miss United States._

She felt creepy dude track her as she departed, pink hair a beacon down the very drab, we’ll-just-forget-this-part-of-the-facility-exists-and-fund-the-biannual-hockey-tournament-instead corridor. 

When she was thirty feet away, the woman stopped and turned to look over her shoulder. 

“Well?” She asked roundly. The only key was in her pocket. He would need to keep up. “Are you coming or not?”

__________________________________________________________________

Sasori followed.

__________________________________________________________________  
  


“Iwa!” Tsunade thundered, the vein in her forehead keeping time to _Stayin’ Alive_. 

_A-a-a-a_ _—_

“You need to have a talk with whatever Chik-Fil-A cow writes your reports,” She thrust a small forest’s worth of documentation his direction. “Look at this mess. Transcription keeps getting on my ass about how shit is illegible and won’t be processed until it’s redone.” 

_Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin'_ , her vein pulsed.

“This morning they tried to be cute and requested budget to borrow the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum.” She sucked her teeth. “I hate them and hope to never communicate again.”

Deidara agreed. “Those dicks should have returned the Parthenon Marbles ages ago. If we keep condoning their actions, we’re guilty by inaction.”

“I was talking about Transcription.” She clarified.

“Perhaps I was as well.” The blond tapped his noggin solemnly. “Things get all jumbled up in here.” 

Tsunade took a moment. The many karmic consequences of her troubled youth appeared to be rearing their hydra-heads. Why had she been such a moody little bitch growing up? Fuck, she and Jiraiya had defaced so many storefronts... And the shoulder pads. She had worn such eye-gouging shoulder pads they might as well have been criminal, too. Though in her defense, those she could solidly blame on Orochimaru...

Not coincidentally, “it was Orochimaru’s fault” was also her excuse for jury-rigging the sprinkler system at the Hidden Leaf Mall. Which was how officer Sarutobi had found her. And _apparently_ , old man Hiruzen had been playing the long con the whole time he mentored her from stoop kid to sergeant. _That smarmy husk. Rehabilitating a vulnerable delinquent and then saddling them with your dumbass public service job so you can die/retire/do fuck-all in Kumo._ Now here she was, stuck in his former office, running the yellow-tape circus, and contending with subordinates she’d rather put in the tank.

(“I’ll spray-paint whatever I want, overcooked bastard!” Angsty teenage Tsunade catch-phrased.)

“Fix this rat’s nest.” Present-day Tsunade demanded. 

_Life goin' nowhere, somebody help me, yeah, I’m stayin’ alive._

“You got it, boss-lady.” Deidara said, swinging his sticky grabby hand across the captain’s desk. (He and the ‘maki had done _Dave & Buster’s_ for lunch). The polymer sprang back, questionable report in tow; he caught the paper with a flourish. (All told, pretty elegant for a sticky grabby hand. Excepting the fact that it knocked over a coffee cup, some photo frames, and Tsunade’s drinking bird desk toy.)

 _Hmm...there had been some of those at the prize counter, too.._. Deidara looked at the fallen plastic bird dolefully. He was happy with his hand, truly—it was blue and stretchy and had been within his ticket range—butbutbut. _The heart wants what the heart wants_. 

He’d need to get better at skeeball.

“I’ll schedule some time to talk to Tobi about how he can improve, yeah. Maybe draft up a performance plan.”

(Deidara had definitely written this report himself.) 

“Tell ‘Tobi,’” Tsunade air-quoted, righting the drinking bird. “To use something other than a bingo marker this time!” 

“Will do!”

__________________________________________________________________

Deidara gripped the fat-tipped Sharpie and pondered. 

He’d wondered before whether his red-haired friend (“we’re not friends” _“okayokay, bestfriends, yeah”_ ) was more exaggerated myth than anything else. One of those stockpiled nuclear weapons that _technically still counted_ on the national tally, but whose fissile material had decayed to the point where it was more a terrifying paperweight than a legit warhead. 

Then of course, the car crusher thing had happened.

And, in the ensuing fallout, Deidara was made very, _very_ assured that _Holy Hell, the guy was insane_.

Sasori didn’t tenant the chaotic evil square on the alignment chart so much as he ran its Homeowners Association. It made the blond man wish he could change his second-grade “ _When I grow up, I want to be…_ ” answer. _Freaky, yeah_. 

The whole thing was kind of provocation-dependent, though. Left undisturbed, Akasuna had a standing blood pressure comparable to that of a deflated balloon. ( _Ahaha! ‘sori’s voice if he ever inhaled helium...!_ )

And Deidara speculated that—whenever his friend ( _bestfriend_ ) habitually went dead in the eye—he was daydreaming about being under a heat lamp, on a nice rock, plotting, eating crickets, hissing when folks got too close. A dream that any other cold-blooded, bifurcated-tongue predator would be wont to have.

(The redhead was simply too big to fit in a terrarium. Hence, the subterranean lair. (“ _Lab_.”))

Iwa Deidara thought about all these things. He thought really, really hard. He had a snack break half-way through to give himself a protein boost, and then kept thinking.

—but _for the life of him_ , he _could not_ reconcile what he knew _(_ _knew_ _!)_ about Sasori with the stricken, green-gilled man frozen in place beside him.

“Repeat that again, yeah?” He prompted.

Sasori (or perhaps, body-snatched Sasori look-alike?) remained fixed on the gas chromatograph.

“She ordered medical-grade leeches.” He said.

“The part before that.”

“She slapped me.”

“Back it up juuust a bit—?” _Put my thing down, flip it and reverse it, bubbububububuh._

“She pushed me off a subway platform.” 

Deidara swung his index finger in a _that’s-the-ticket_ gesture. “And you feel…?”

Sasori made a face. Deidara also made a face. 

“No.” He denied. “No. I forbid this.”

The blond man looked around the toxicology lab suspiciously. He was being Punk’d, he was sure of it. Where’d they hide the microphones? In those Erlenmeyer flasks? Had to be. Had. To Be.

‘Cause if Deidara wasn’t being Punk’d, if someone wasn’t orchestrating a hilarious gotchyousogood, it meant that comprehendible space-time had just turned inside-out. This was beyond Mercury-is-in-retrograde territory. This was button-under-the-desk, send reinforcements, _lord, please let him have already gotten the birds-and-the-bees talk, lord, I don’t want to be that person, please lord._

“So, you definitely don’t want to hear this,” Deidara wished he’d done more things in his life. Wished he’d opened that surf shop he always talked about. Wished he’d gone down Niagra Falls in a barrel. Wished he’d gotten the _No Regrats_ tattoo for the irony. He was so young to already be exiting this earthly realm.

“But I think,” Deidara bid the world goodbye.

_(Man, Tobi better not be in charge of writing my obituary.)_

_“_...you might li—”

A centrifuge hit him in the face.

__________________________________________________________________

Sasori sized-up the autoclave. 

_High-capacity, 1800 liters._ The label read. 

Big enough, Sasori assessed and began to climb inside. Behind him, the white noise of Deidara’s protestations continued. The concussion had actually made him more articulate. 

“—this is you, retreating to the womb—”

 _Yes,_ Sasori thought. The autoclave was a good and pragmatic place to welcome death.

__________________________________________________________________

_Shit._ Deidara realized, blocking the security latch with his foot. 

_Someone has to tell Ino._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I have this planned accordingly, but, ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ only time will tell.
> 
> *prepares to Evel Knievel* across a crevasse*
> 
> Messing around on Tumblr @sayyikes


	2. Chapter 2

“I ran over your cat.” Deidara declared. 

Ino gasped. Then did a series of rapid calculations in her head, and quickly remembered: _Hold on, I don’t have_ **_a cat_** _. The hell?_ There was only one other feasible conclusion at which to arrive—

“Ew,” The woman said, disgusted. “Is this supposed to be innuendo? Do you want to visit your friends in HR again?” She shook her head and badged into the Interrogation corridor, manila files swatting him away. (Redacted, redacted, redacted). “You absolute infant.” 

Deidara took a deep, waist-trimming gulp and Selina Kyle-d in after her.

“It’s called the foot-in-the-door technique, yeah.” He expanded. Then reversed so as to walk backwards. “When you soften _bad_ news with _worse_ news.”

The corridor was buzzing. At the sight of the blonde pair, a weak-kneed rookie fled. Ino wished she could do the same. Deidara had terrible peripheral vision, and zero regard for personal space.

“Unsurprisingly,” The blonde woman decreed, charging forward. “That is _incorrect._ Stop using words you don’t understand. I spend half of my billable hours explaining to people who think you’re artsy and poetic, that you’re actually just dumb.” 

He had to pirouette to avoid a fatal blow from her ponytail. Followed left. 

“It’s starting to interfere with my real work.” (“Making weak men cry?” “Strong men, too. I don’t discriminate.”)

They reached her office door. _Yamanaka, I_. It read, dull and unassuming. But opened to reveal what might as well have been a _Victoria’s Secret_ pop-up shop. Glittery accents, feminine curtains, an old custody desk turned makeshift vanity (and adorned with bangles the same diameter as the relic-y manacles they hung upon). In the corner, Ino’s essential oil diffuser—from _Bath & Body Works_, thank you very much, she _did not_ support MLMs—rang quarter past. It sent out a nebulized cloud of scent just in time to catch Deidara with his mouth open.

“Ack,” He spat. Then smacked his lips in consideration. “Well, actually...”

(“It’s Vanilla Patchouli.” “Do you still have the bottle?” “Yeah, here, take a picture for later.”)

This 12’x12’ office made the rest of T&I quake in fear.

“You said worse news.” The blonde woman sat at her desk. It was raised on a dais. (Having the psychological high ground didn’t stop at verbal evisceration. It also meant manipulating your environment to match ancient Mesopotamian standards; making people feel inferior physically as well as mentally. Even if (especially if) those people were your colleagues). “What news is worse than the fact that you’re currently standing in front of me, looking like someone who would be refused the key to the restroom at a truckstop?” 

Deidara fell onto her velvet accent chair, affronted but not protesting. 

_Unusual..._

Semi-unconsciously, Ino shifted into professional mode. _He’s holding my gaze, but he’s blinking rapidly._ She noted. _The lip-biting indicates stress. Closed posture, which is inconsistent with his typical demeanor. And more fidgety than usual too, but it’s the start of the month, so he might’ve just forgotten to pick up his new Adderall prescription. Or maybe someone replaced them with Mentos and he hasn’t noticed again._

“You’re nervous.” She said. “Why?”

He waffled, unsure how to start.

“Mmmm...this’s tough. It’s personal.”

Ino’s brow furrowed. Was it possible that Deidara had depth of feeling after all? This pathetic man-child she’d only ever known to be an immature dumpster fire? Who she once saw lick a shopping cart handle, despite no one daring him to? “And you needed someone... _to talk to about it_?”

“Oh, hahaha! It’s not _me_ personal, yeah.” He explained, mimicking her body language. Legs crossed, chin on hand. (Five-finger-discounting the Vanilla Patchouli.) “It’s _you_ personal.” 

Ino’s confused, _my-nonexistent-cat-has-just-been-run-over?!_ calculations started up again.

“...say what now?”

Deidara planted his feet. He knew it had to be done. It was best to just bellyflop right in. Before the aromatherapy Lotus-ate him into forgetting his mission here.

“You’re friends with Sakura in pathology, right? Like good friends?” He asked.

“Am I...friends…?”

Ino loomed over her desk, eyes narrowing. Eyes closing fully, actually, yeah. “If you’re asking if ‘Sakura in pathology’ is my _ride-or-die_ —my dyad in the Force, the ghost Cathy to my Heathcliffe, the _Stranger Things_ to my Netflix merch line, _the Baja Blast to my Taco Bell happy hour menu!_ —then, uh, _yes_ , I’m ‘ _friends’_ with Sakura!” 

_Fucking_ ** _moron._** _Pfftpftft._

“Great! So you have her cell phone number, yeah?”

Her scoffing became a choke. 

Which in turn became an icy chill.

“ _Deidara._ ” Ino said, leaning in. She started to unclasp her hoop earrings. The explosives expert recognized this as a precursor to violence and began to pocket-dial 911. 

“Sweet, addled Deidara. I am a sieve, okay? A _colander._ ”

 _("Hello?”_ A small, Yamato-dull voice came from his jacket. _Damn it, misdialed.)_

“—I exist to filter out all of the disgusting stuff that tries to get near my sister-friend.” Ino’s blue stare was piercing. “ _You_ are a jumbo shell pasta noodle. It’s not gonna happen. I’m nipping it in the bud right here, right now. Irrelevant. End of conversation.”

“I’m not asking for m—” The blond man started.

“ _We’re done here._ ” 

“‘naka, open your ears!” 

“ _Permission denied! Get gone!_ ” She sang, procuring a pink taser from who the hell knew where. Then: “I have tear gas if you’d prefer.” (Those diffusers were so multipurpose.)

Deidara gat. 

  
  


\-------------------------------------------------------------

_"If you were trying to reach the pizza place, it's 645, not 646... hello?"_

\-------------------------------------------------------------

  
  


Sakura’s knuckles rapped on Tsunade’s door. 

She waited the customary five seconds— _Symptoms include dry-mouth, glaucoma, restless leg syndrome, and immaculate conception._ _Ask your doctor if Xeljanz XR is right for you_ —(“Come in!”). Hah. **_Skip Ad_** **.** Never buying your product.

—and entered the tiny office.

Inside, the dynamic duo sat, a sheaf of papers between them and their peeved blonde boss (the pigtailed woman had sixteen minutes to go before she could open the minifridge under her desk. Every second until then was agony). 

At her interruption, Sasuke and Naruto turned their attention from the case debriefing. Tsunade also turned to face the pink-haired woman, but their police captain currently had a sake-crazy look, so it wasn’t recommended to make direct eye contact. 

“Hello,” Sakura announced, eyes trained on the floor ( _Textbook Gorgon Evasion Procedure._ ) “It’s me, your friendly, neighborhood wrench-thrower.” 

She allowed them a moment to register the statement. And then a second moment, because, _No Detective Left Behind_. 

Their eventual reactions varied.

“Huh?” Naruto blanked.

“...fuck.” Sasuke said. 

“Fifteen and a half,” Tsunade thought aloud. 

Sakura acted fast, saving a coffee cup from the Uchiha’s despairing grip. 

“Just once,” The black-haired man grimaced, running a now-free hand through his hair. It stood up in every direction. Very sea urchin-y. “I’d like to get a case that doesn’t go ass-backwards.” 

(“Maybe you’re the one with the bad juju, and not the cases. Ever thought of that, teme? I’m telling you, do yoga with me just the once and—”)

“What’s going on?” Tsunade questioned. 

Sakura closed the door behind her.

“I just finished salad-chopping that Hayate Gekkou guy you two carted in.” She recounted, doing a little Kung-Fu Fighting shuffle to accompany her description. This movement jostled the shanghaied coffee, and a good bit of liquid landed on Sasuke’s shirt. 

(“I see Itachi and some crows,” he Rorschache-read the stain.

“Sorry, sorry.” 

“Nah, this is great, ’ttebayo! Using a TidePen gives him a buzz!”)

“—Gekkou’s medical records say that he received a kidney transplant four-ish years ago. Didn’t mention any sort of nephrectomy, though, just a cut-and-dry transplant. But,” Sakura rested a hand on Naruto’s head. He peered at her. “When I opened him up an hour ago, I found,” She raised her fingers in a ‘V’. “ _Two_ kidneys.”

Tsunade made a concerned humming noise. Indiscreetly sank down in her chair. Reached searchingly for the minifridge. So. _Close._

“Exactly.” Sakura said.

(“It might also be a cloud. Or, I don’t know, three commas or something…?”)

Naruto looked back and forth between the women in the room. 

“I’m not a doctor,” The blond man said cautiously. “And I don’t like beans. (“A chicken?”) So this is probably gonna sound stupid. But, I thought that was how many _we’re supposed to have?_ ”

“Brace yourself.” Tsunade told Naruto. And also a bit herself, as she balanced off the lip of her chair. 

“You’re born with two kidneys.” Sakura swatted her friend in the sides diagrammatically. “You operate maximally with two kidneys. Two kidneys are ideal. But if things go south, and you end up needing and getting a transplant, they don’t remove your dud original.” 

She poked him in the gut. He Pillsbury Doughboy-ed. “They just sort of tack the third one on. Like when you split a cable line illegally.”

Sasuke gave her an accusatory look. (“How else were Ino and I supposed to watch _TrueBlood?_ ”)

“But the dental records match?” A bead of sweat dripped down Tsunade’s neck.

“They do.”

“So it’s possible you’re just wrong?” Sasuke didn’t mince words.

“You...looked extra hard?” Naruto did.

“Yes and yes. I’m telling you, I’m getting a bad read on this one. I feel it. I feel it like Phil Collins would feel it. Something’s not right.” She’d stake her reputation on this.

“I BELIEVE YOU.” Tsunade said, extra loud. It didn’t drown out the sound of the can opening under her desk.

“WHO COULD HAVE MANIPULATED THE RECORDS?”

\-------------------------------------------------------------

  
  
“She told me to expedite the tox report on him, but that’s definitely not gonna happen. I still have labs backlogged from _last month._ ”

Shizune looked up. The eye she was draining of vitreous fluid also looked up. Albeit droopily. 

“Why does your stuff always take so long to get results back?” The dark haired woman queried. “I’ll submit stuff and get the readings in like, three days. You sending samples via carrier pigeon or what?”

“?” The sunken eyeball wondered. “?” 

Sakura shut the cold chamber with her hip. She wiggled her toes; studied the rusty drain.

“Because the guy in toxicology hates me.” _On account of he’s a sadistic, nonhuman dirt pile._ “I got on his bad side,” _Ie. very lightly back-handed him with the front of my hand_ “—and this is his passive aggressive way of retaliating.” _Also that thing with the Metro._ But that was so absurd, and illegal, and potentially career-ending that she had blocked it out as a fever dream. What was she even talking about? What Metro thing? _Leonidas._ No.Metro.Thing.To.See.Here. _Messenger down a well._ Compartmentaliiiiiizing successsfulllyyyy.

“?” Eyeball entreated.

“Just peachy.” Sakura replied, imitation-peach-flavored.

Still. 

She wondered if their dynamic might shift after what had happened yesterday. 

On paper, yesterday’s proceedings could well be interpreted as the inflection point in her association with the red-haired creep. She had been saintly, extending him an oligochaetic flag of truce. Forgoing her oath to run counter to him in all things in favor of a détente, a brighter future, an—if not cordial, then at least frictionless—coexistence.

He had not been receptive. 

(Or maybe he had. She wasn't conversationally fluent in hellspawn. " **¿** **Donde está el infierno?** ")

 _I shouldn’t have invited him over the threshold!_ Sakura bewailed, prepping the rib splitters. _Never give night creatures permission to enter!_

At most, it could be said that yesterday’s encounter was their least combative to date. Largely due to the fact that the toxicologist had only spoken three words to her in the entire course of the limb-leeching. A perfunct question, right at the start: “Eye-wash station?”

Well. At least he respected lab safety protocols. 

That was a slim tally for the ‘decent’ column. How lonely it was.

Yes. Yesterday had been bizarro. His following and subsequent observation of her seemed as unwilling on his part as it had been unenthusiastic on hers. Like, she knew they weren’t going to be chummy. But the not-exhibiting-even-an-iota of-Anything-At-All. _That_ bothered her. This wasn’t a damn _audit_. This was just two people, casually watching segmented worms exsanguinate a torso-less leg. Live it up some.

And! AND! His apathy had persisted even after she’d offered him one of the leeches to take home! It was a last-ditch effort to elicit _any_ response from him. Sakura’d plucked a leech from the cadaver and handed it off in a post-mortem pouch like it was a blood-sucking goody bag. Like she was thanking him for coming to her birthday party. (Even if he was on the wrong side of the ‘every-child-in-your-class-or-no-one-at-all’ invitation spectrum.)

He’d left in silence, same as he’d arrived. No gratitude. No acknowledgement. Simply departure.

 _Good riddance._ Sakura brushed off. _Sayonara. I hope fate blesses us and we never cross paths in this building again. Good tidings to your worm. I pray Leech Marin awards you the comradeship you so evidently require._ Though the man definitely didn’t deserve any, Eldritch horror that he was. 

_Also,_ A rogue thought came unbidden. _He doesn't have any right to eyelashes that lush. Or zygomatic bones that delicate._

...

...wait.

“Ugh, no, that’s weird. I don’t like that.” Sakura said, applying leverage to the rib splitters. A satisfying snap sounded in the room. _Like buttah_ , she reveled.


	3. Chapter 3

**DONUT HOLES IN THE 2ND FLOOR BREAKROOM!!!!**

_From:_ Hoshigaki, Kisame <Hoshigaki.k@kii.gov>  
 _To:_ [Aburame.s@kii.gov](mailto:Aburame.s@kii.gov), [Akasuna.s@kii.gov](mailto:Akimichi.c@kii.gov), [Akimichi.c@kii.gov](mailto:Akimichi.c@kii.gov), …

\----

Hi all. We’ve got donut holes up for grabs on the 2nd floor.

Sasuke is outside distracting Itachi, which gives you T minus 5 minutes to hoof it over here.

  
  


**FWD: DONUT HOLES IN THE 2ND FLOOR BREAKROOM!!!!**

_From:_ Hoshigaki, Kisame <Hoshigaki.k@kii.gov>  
 _To:_ [Aburame.s@kii.gov](mailto:Aburame.s@kii.gov), [Akasuna.s@kii.gov](mailto:Akimichi.c@kii.gov), [Akimichi.c@kii.gov](mailto:Akimichi.c@kii.gov), …

\----

Me again. 

In my haste to send that last email, I forgot to remove Itachi from the CC list.

Run.

\-----------------------------------------------------------

“What do you want?” Sakura asked. 

Deidara tried to look casual. 

“Just grabbing some food, yeah,” _Definitely not reconnaissancing. Sing. Sssing._ He opened the snack cabinet. _Act natural._ Grabbed a box labelled **INUzUkA**. 

“No, what do you want?” She gestured at the soda machine. “I have a five. Pick something, my treat.”

Deidara didn’t. Couldn’t. He couldn’t. Couldn’t didn’t Deidara.

He wasn’t hardwired for courtesy. (It gave him the heebie jeebies, yeah.) His system simply could not compute this sort of interaction. Bald-faced dislike was honest, it was real-talk. But niceness=falsehood, and falsehood=conniving, so by the transitive property, well, he wasn’t sure—all the math he knew he’d learned from _Mean Girls_ —but basically, it boiled down to unsolicited kindness=bad. (“That’s the wrong answer, but you showed your work, so half-credit, I guess.”)

Deidara stuffed his mouth with Kiba’s cookies. Swung out his arms to make himself appear bigger than he actually was. And slammed down on his internal self-destruct button. Either he would explode, or it would turn a chair on _The Voice_. No in-between.

“I’ll just get you a Diet Coke.” Sakura elected. 

He watched on as she tried to feed the bill into the slot. (Zzzzrr. “Don’t spit it out, it’s facing right-side-up.”) His self-destruct button was evidently not the only thing under maintenance. (Zzzzrr. “Oh, other way.”)

Hmm…

What was it about pink-haired Miss Thing that had given Sasori engine knock? Stone-faced, ‘people are vermin,’ ‘I’d cut your safety harness and then dissuade search-and-rescue from looking for your body’ Sasori? She was pretty, sure. But that had never been a factor in catching the man’s interest before. And she was apparently generous, yeah, which—if Deidara knew the redhead half as well as he claimed (and he did, they were like the freaking Ya-Ya Sisterhood)—that generosity should actually count as a repellant. 

_Maybe she reanimates the dead._ A ghoulish voice blew in his ear. ( _Ooh,_ that tickled. He shivered.)

Could that be it? Deidara didn’t know all the nuts and bolts, all the particulars of what a pathologist did (stupid naming convention, not intuitive at all, didn’t mean, like, a career counselor or a trail guide...), but he was relatively certain that it had to do with corpses. 

Ah…what else was there? She was colorful, yeah. Very _very_ colorful. Absurdly, eye-catchingly, Jolly Rancher kinds of colorful...

 _That’s it!_ Deidara Eureka’d. He understood! What else in nature was _insanely bright_? Capable of holding Sasori’s attention? Three words: Poison dart frogs. Of course—it would be just like Sasori to “ _gravitate towards”_ (the large bruise on Deidara’s head reminded him not to use the phrase _“attracted to”_ ) something toxic! 

_Ha._ He was so brilliant. And wouldn't ya know it, life made a bit more sense again. _Watch out, Uzumaki! There’s a new detective in town, yeah, and I’m one. For. One._

Deidara grinned. (Also, looked down at the nutrition facts on the box of cookies, because, _damn, the heck were these? They were delicious._ ) Grinned again when poison dart girl succeeded in getting the five dollar bill through. What a tremendous trio they all would make.

Such was the scene Ino beheld when she entered two seconds later.

The blond man—whom she had very succinctly (and with the assurance of bodily harm) cautioned away from her friend—lurking around said friend like a late-eighties Cheshire Cat, _sohelpherGod._

Uh uh. NOPE.

 _Screw this guy._ Ino scowled. She had left her taser behind in her office, assuming that—had she needed to fight for donut holes—a spork to the jugular would serve just as well. But the breakroom had been Black-Fridayed. Too many people, not enough holes, absolute carnage. Even the plastic utensils were depleted. How was she supposed to inflict violence now?

 _Have to rob this bank on a bluff_ , the psychoanalyst decided, advancing on Deidara with a hand behind her back. “Those are Milk Bones.” She said.

The blond man rolled his eyes. Crunched exaggeratedly. “Joke’s on you, I’m not vegan anymore, yeah.”

"Too much reading involved?" (He flinched. That was...not far from the truth...)

Sakura remained oblivious to the confrontation going on behind her. _Her_ opponent was seven feet tall, full of coolant, and not registering her drink selection. She retreated a foot, and then powerslammed the machine with her shoulder, a little move she’d learned in cotillion. 

The soda machine succumbed, whining. 

_Not an honorable or belt-worthy win, but it’ll get me to the next ring…_ The pink-haired woman thought. She extended her hard-won can for someone to grab while she readied for round two. 

Deidara reached.

Ino intercepted.

 _Wants to take hold and then what?_ She glared at him. _Accidentally brush hands? Share a sip so they could swap spit off the rim?_ Ino wished she had a lifeguard whistle. (“Out of the pool! You’re foul and now we have to call the health department. Thank this man, ladies and gentlemen, for polluting our waters. Boo this man!”). _Thirsty bitch-bag. You’re never going to drink again. I’m going to make sure you shrivel up and die. I said she was off-limits to you. I warned you. IWarnedYou._

“Thank you,” Ino told her friend. Pointed at her eyes and then at Deidara’s in an ‘always watching’ movement.

“Oh, oh! Ino!” Sakura piledrived another soda out of the machine. “Would you care for a plant? Or perhaps multiple?” 

The blonde pulled her can tab. “From where? Some dead guy eat watermelon seeds?” 

Her friend laughed.

(Deidara was glad he'd already made his frog discovery. Otherwise he would have called the whole thing a fluke right then. No way Sasori would catch ~~feels~~ gravitational waves for someone _capable of laughter_.)

“No, nothing germinating in any guts. Just, Zetsu came down to borrow some cover slips last week and I guess he was offended by the air quality, which, you know, occupational hazard—it’s not Wendy’s, folks aren’t fresh.” She shrugged and clinked some coins into the slot. “He dumped a rainforest on me this morning. Said the place could benefit from filtration or something: there are palms and evergreens, and some flowers that might be daisies? You’ll probably know. Those aren’t on offer, though. Well. Unless you have something of equal or greater value to trade (“What if I had a best friend coupon?” Ino side-eyed Deidara. _Best friend_ , she mouthed.)—they’re all nice, but there’s _just. so. many_. And it’s super humid now, I think they’ve altered the tundra biome we had going.”

Sakura stood upright, a soda in either hand.

“It does smell better though. Makes me wonder how potent it was before...”

Concern was suddenly writ on the pink-haired woman’s face. She absently handed Deidara his can (Ino’s arms were a hair’s breadth too short to deflect this time), and clutched the other close to her chest. Turned to the blonde woman:

“Do _I_ smell like death?” Sakura half-whispered. 

Ino rolled her eyes. 

“No, Pig, you don’t get it. I’m in there like _twelve hours a day_ (“That’s a work-life-balance issue, we’ll address that separately”)—have I been carrying the stench of death everywhere I go and just been so habituated to it that I don’t even notice?! Do people leave the room because of me!? Like a PacMan ghost?”

She gasped.

“Was this just Zetsu’s way of trying to clue me in?! He tried to spare my feelings—I give Naruto TicTacs all the time—ohno. _Ohno_.”

A cold soda pressed against her forehead. 

“Stop.” Ino commanded. 

Sakura stilled.

“If you reeked of plague, I would be the first damn one to tell you.” The blonde woman assured. (“Unless _you’re_ habituated, too...”) “No! Knock it off. All I smell is, eh, cherry almond—” 

( _Cyanide,_ Deidara thought. _Sasori probably registered it as cyanide.)_

Forget the shower, the second floor breakroom was officially his new sphere of enlightenment.

“—and maybe nitrile?” 

“My gloves are nitrile.” Sakura took a deep breath. She trusted Ino, she trusted Ino, _she trusted Ino, shetrustedIno—_

“I’ll take a plant, yeah.”

The women pivoted. 

From his perch on the table, Deidara rubbed his chin. Snarfed down another (calcium-supplement?) cookie. 

“I like plants.” _Recon, recon. Reconnaissance. Renaissance. Raphael. April O’Neil. Surf Ninja._ “All sorts of plants. Green plants. Dark green plants. Leafy plants. Whatever-they-feed-manatees-plants—”

“Have you had your meds today?” Ino interrupted. She was going to kill him, true. But her earlier suspicion might still be viable.

“Ah.” _He had not!_ Deidara outturned a jacket pocket, searching. A white tablet flew out (also some miscellaneous vials. Luckily he caught them all before anything broke or collided, which, _low-key_ , would have been the opposite of kosher, yeah. These largely weren’t supposed to leave the combustibles cabinet. But, uh. _YOLO_ ). 

“Big lily-pad plants, Pluto’s not a plant—” He palmed the white tablet and opened his soda. Time to wash down a delicious Adderall with some Diet Coke. (Neck back. Swallow).

...

“Whoah,” Deidara said. 

Then:

“Wfffwfff.” 

Ino looked on in satisfaction. Foam geysered out of the man’s mouth. (“Not usually grateful for wearing my scrubs in common spaces. What a day.”) Somewhere between his sinuses and the hollow where Deidara's brain should have been, the river forked, and his nose also began to spigot. 

Ino’s satisfaction became full-fledged glee.

  
  


\--------------------------------------------------

  
  


_Hmm,_ Tsunade squinted at the scene from her office window. _We’re way overdue for a visit from the fire marshal. Should probably check the extinguishers._

...but that sounded like a chore, sooo...She looked away momentarily to grab another tallboy. When Tsunade peered back up, there was a dark figure blocking her view.

 _It’s the end of days,_ the blonde woman thought balefully. But also with a certain vindication. _Thank goodness I didn’t waste precious moments of my life checking those extinguishers._

“What’s this?” She asked when the figure dropped a packet in front of her. Tsunade rotated the papers; condensation from her fingers making some of the toner bleed together.

“My time-off paperwork.” Sasori drawled. “I’m taking a sabbatical.” 

The police captain grunted unhappily. 

“Usually, this sort of thing has to be requested and approved _months in advance_. Not just hot-potatoed into my lap the day before.”

He stared. She relented.

“Fine. Whatever. It’s Friday, I have no more fucks to give.” Tsunade dragged an inkpad and a stamp across her desk. “The hell are you even going to to do for—” Squint. “ _...a month?_ Visit your grandmother in Suna? You gonna give her the heads up you didn’t give me?”

Sasori had his ears trained to drone continuous white noise, blocking out the sounds from the kitchen. One voice still managed to pierce the veil.

 _(“You could give Old Faithful a run for its money.”)_

“No.” He answered, face wooden. “I burned the Ouija board.” 

The pigtailed woman should have been alarmed. Chiyo _was_ up there in years and _did_ have a categorically Superman villain-level leadfoot. To assume the old crone had finally kicked the proverbial piss-bucket was within reason. But—and there was always a but—Tsunade had literally _just_ received her weekly hate mail from the woman. An expressive and catty lambasting that arrived to her inbox like clockwork before the start of each weekend. 

Yeah. Odds were Chiyo was still alive. Stripping paint in some room with the sheer stringency of her presence. The red-haired toxicologist had merely inherited his grandmother’s deadpan. 

“Well, next time you see her, tell her the baking soda was a nice touch.”

\---------------------------------------------------

Ino didn’t make a habit of visiting Sakura in her realm. It was _outstandingly_ creepy, and overly cold, and usually accompanied by a soundtrack of bone saws and popping cartilage and other gross, gross things. (Also, alternative music. Blegh “That’s Shizune’s playlist!” “Then why are you head-bopping?”). Ino didn’t tolerate such sounds while making chicken dumplings, and she definitely didn’t tolerate them when other people made human flesh fricassee. So, yes, whenever she met up with her best friend, it was always Sakura joining Ino in T&I, or both of them venturing out to an external, secondary location. Just not Sakura’s path lab. Never that sterile, tiled, grated, so-this-is-where-all-the-air-conditioning-in-the-building-goes-to path lab. 

But Ino’s vignetted recollection of that _horrifying_ space— _this_ horrifying space?—was nothing at all like the botanical gardens in which she now stood. 

“Oh my god.” Ino said.

“Yeah, I know.” 

_“Oh my god."_ Ino said again.

“It’s like someone opened an Almond Joy in here, yeah.” Deidara pawed at a Chinese Evergreen. 

Sakura brushed some foliage aside so she could access her standing desk. “Just, I guess, take your pick—not the daisies, though!—something other than the daisies. Or maybe the daisies, but you’ll need to make it worth my while.”

Ino looked at the daisies in question. _And_ the dahlias _and_ the honeysuckles _and_ the marigolds _and_ the firestix. 

_Filtration_ her ass.

“Does Zetsu give you flowers a lot, yeah?” Deidara sounded more perturbed than she could ever recall him sounding. Typically, things kind of slip-and-slided right off of him. _Lord._ Even Mt. Vesuvius over here was less unawares than her pink-haired friend. 

“No, just these.” Sakura said.

Mhmm. It was time for him to go. Ino needed to address the flying elephant in the room, and a jealous, reject Bratz Doll was only going to get in her way.

“Here,” Ino shoved a pot of ivy at Deidara. “You got your plant. Now leave.” 

“You—” He garbled as he was propelled towards the door. She had a fierce hold on the scruff of his collar. Might’ve pulled some hair. Wouldn’t admit if it was intentional. “Wa—”

And. 

_Shut._

“Sakura.” The blonde turned about slowly. (Almost—dare Sakura say—Hansel & Gretel witch style.) “Is it possible—and, just, just _humor me_ for a minute here—is it _possible_ that Zetsu was _maybe_ trying to tell you something? Not a—not an air-purifying thing—or maybe yes, I don’t know this man well enough to guess his proclivities—but perhaps more of a _dinner-and-a-movie_ sort of thing?” 

The pathologist appeared confused. She glanced at the greenery around her.

“Like, _Steel Magnolias_?” Sakura asked.

_Bless her heart._

“Sweetie,” Ino batted away a frond. Took a seat next to the pink-haired woman. “When was the last time you went on a date? Like, when was the last time _you got any_?”

Sakura rolled. (“Come back here.”) 

“I’ll tell you the last one _I_ remember you going on. It was with that accountant dude.”

“Stock analyst.”

“Okay, stock analyst dude. Did that date have _profitable returns_? Would you say it was _a bull market_?” (Her friend avoided her eyes, pulling the neck of her scrub top up to her reddening ears. _“Arghhh—”_ ) “Did he trade in _penny stocks_? Was that the problem? _Micro_ -economics?” ( _“—ggggghhhhhhh…”_ ) “I’m not making terrible metaphors for my own sake. Answer the question!”

Sakura emerged from her ad-hoc turtle shell. “The date was good.” Retreated again.

“At least the SparkNotes summary, _please_.” Ino requested.

 _“We didn’t go home together.”_ Came muffled through scrub.

“Disappointing. Though not unanticipated.”

 _“We_ did _kiss.”_

“...salvageable...”

“Only, _when_ we kissed,” Sakura resurfaced, biting her bottom lip as she recalled the evening. “His breath was _really fruity_. And we hadn’t ordered dessert or wine or anything sweet for entrees—”

(“ _Oh god,_ don’t say it.”)

“—So I told him, you know, I said ‘Hey, you should probably check that out, you might be pre-diabetic, this could snowball. This could be a big deal.’”

“ _Sakura._ ” The blonde collapsed into her elbow.

“People need to know these things! How else are they going to treat them!”

“ _On the list of certified mood-killers—_ ”

“—ask his general practitioner, they might refer him to—”

“Sakura.” Ino grabbed her friend's face with both hands. Squished it until she was chipmunk-cheeked. “I. Am. So. Sorry. _This_ ,” She gestured vaguely around them. “This is on _me_. I’ve been remiss in my best friend duties. Here I am, gallivanting around, hobnobbing with artists—”

“Yeah, you and Deidara are cute.”

Ino retched a little.

“—the sketch artist! Ohm—! Don’t even joke about Dei—Mm. Mm. MmMm.” She waved a repulsed finger, dismissing the whole topic. “ _My point is_ , I’m here now. Alright? And we’re gonna fix this _together_.”

“ _'This’_ being...?”

“Your life.”

“Ah.” Sakura nodded. “Thank you.” She would take any help she could get.

Ino stepped back. Appraised her friend. _Step one:_ Re-evaluating her taste in guys. Ino hadn’t recalibrated this aspect of her Sakura-meter in so long, her present readings were totally unreliable. 

“Do you like Zetsu? In the StupidCupid sense of the term?” She inquired.

And, listen here: Ino was ready to go-all-in on supporting that funky spumoni-colored relationship. If it was what Sakura wanted, then she would put every _clucking egg_ in that basket. She’d get a foam finger, and a T-shirt cannon, and go on double-dates—Hell, she’d even pay for a huge, highway-side billboard ad—

“No.”

_Oh, thank fuck._

Ino masked her utter relief with a nod. _Thank God, thank Buddha._ Bullet _dodged_. 

“Okay then. Who _does_ catch your eye? Who _would you want_ to go on a date with?”

Sakura didn’t answer immediately. Ino tapped her wrist. _Clock ticking._ Jogged in place, admired her waist. _Patience running thin._ “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” Ino pretended to hobble around with a cane.

“I don’t know! Maybe, _Shisui_?”

The blonde woman blew a raspberry. Sure. What did she expect? She had forced a response.

“That is a good pick, love. He is very handsome. And very funny." Ino leaned in. "Unfortunately, he is also _as gay as the day is long._ ”

“...solstice is coming up, though.” Sakura murmured.

Her friend/guardian angel/shoulder devil/proxy in all things Chipmunk-cheeked her for a second time. 

“Forehead,” Ino wouldn’t frown. Couldn’t frown. It would give her wrinkles. Instead she gazed determinedly and hoped that conveyed the seriousness of her commitment. “You know I’m just looking out for you, right?”

Sakura couldn’t help but smile. Discomfit or no, Ino was all of her _Who Wants to Be a Millionaire_ lifelines rolled into one vicious blonde package. None were a sure bet, but good golly if they didn't boost her confidence.

“I know Pig. I know. I just,” She hugged the blonde. Sniffed. (“It’s lavender. I’m out of the patchouli.”)

Sakura pulled away.

“...I just wish your vision prescription was better.”

That earned her a chokehold.

  
  


\---------------------------------------------------

  
  


Deidara slammed open the door of the botany lab; its green-haired occupant looked up from his microscope in shock.

“Stay in your lane, yeah.” Deidara and his new ivy plant warned.

Then he rear-kicked the door open again, and withdrew just as suddenly. 

(Refusing to break eye contact meant he ran into a few people in the hallway, but it didn’t sully the overall effect, he didn’t think.)

\---------------------------------------------------

“I don't even bike to work anymore.” Zetsu told an empty room.


	4. Chapter 4

Sasori hadn’t spent his undergraduate years synthesizing and self-administering low doses of amobarbital—habituating himself to truth-serum, becoming _psychologically impenetrable_ —just for some pink-haired _Panglosse_ to strong-arm her way past his defenses.

 _“Are_ _you sure?”_ The clay in his hands skepticised. (Kneaded, pinched, wedged.)

Of course Sasori was sure. That was the great benefit of hermetically-sealing one’s psyche: all of your perceptions were pasteurized beyond reproach. And Sasori perceived the notion as debasing. Evincive of ‘the human experience’, every facet of which he flatly denied. 

_“Okay, but…”_ The clay pressed on. “ _Are you absolutely_ **_positive_** _?”_

A fume hood droned. 

Sasori kept his gaze on his Reinsch Test.

He declined to look at the clay. If he looked—if he addressed the unfinessed likeness his idle hands and traitorous subconscious had conspired to make—it would give credence to impossibility. Validation to the odious freezer-burn of panic gnawing at his bones _._

 _"Suppose I_ am _wrong,”_ The clay conceded. Coaxed. (It was shiftier than it let on.) _“There’s really only one way for you to know for certain...”_

Ah. Knowing was powerful. 

Knowing was _tempting._

(Perhaps, if Sasori had had an ounce of respect for the Humanities—even a thimble-full, or a _tiny_ finger prick’s-worth—the red haired man might have recalled Orpheus and Eurydice. Might have remembered the pair’s cautionary tale, and seen fit to smother his doubts at whatever cost. Refused to look but straight ahead, put on blinders, confounded Hades— 

Perhaps.

\---------------

_“Why are literature courses a graduation requirement for STEM tracks?”_

_“To ensure that all of our alumni cultivate well-rounded world views!”_

_“...”_

_“..?”_

_“...no one studying literature will need world views.”_

_“I’m sorry?”_

_“Kmart isn’t an international chain.”_

\---------------

Perhaps not.)

Suffice to say, Sasori looked. 

He looked and he recognized and that freezer-burnt panic became amputation-necessitating frostbite. Rough planes of clay bore the shadow of a familiar brow; the foundations of a distinctive nose. It was the early stages of a bust. And _incontrovertible_ evidence that he had been compromised. 

“QED.” The clay said smugly.

Sasori crushed the face with his thumb. 

An ungodly slam sounded a moment later. Pipettes scattered to the floor, while a vial of mercurous nitrate teetered precariously on the reagents shelf. (He gave the vial a look. It stilled.)

“So, we hate Zetsu now, yeah” Deidara announced, stampeding through the door. “Broseph gave good CBD oil recommendations, but it is what it is.” The blond suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. Doubled-back out the door to check the number over the lab entrance. (B18. That was right. He always remembered, because it was fun to say _“Must B18 for a good time.”_ Lol, yeah.) No. No. Not Lol. What was going on?

Deidara re-entered the room. Pointed a finger at the unfamiliar, silver-haired man in the corner.

“Who _the hell_ are you?” 

(It was definitely not—read: _not_ —his best friend. Had he entered a time warp? Accidentally arrived on the 8th floor, in room _8_ 18? Or was his mind just playing tricks on him? Like, maybe it wasn’t actually a person at all, just a person-shaped extraction arm? )

The person shape coughed.

 _Ugh._ It _was_ a real dude. 

“Where’s Sasori?” Deidara brought his ivy plant down on the bench forcefully. Where was _Tobi_ , for that matter? He’d told the kid to meet him here ages ago...

“I—I’m Yakushi Kabuto,” The silver-haired man introduced. He sounded pretty unsure for someone saying their own name. Worm. “I’m going to be filling in for Akasuna-hakase while he’s away.” 

“Away?!” Deidara whomped his plant down a second time.

“I don’t officially begin until Monday,” Kabuto quibbled. “But I thought I’d come by today, and get acquainted with the setup while Akasuna-hakase was—” He motioned pathetically. “—still here to answer my questions.”

Deidara followed the man’s limp-wristed gesture. His eyes landed on a mop of red hair by Sasori’s desk. _Oh, praise Kami. He wasn’t missing. Crisis averted._ And thank fuck, because Deidara didn’t know who you were supposed to contact to get a face on the side of a milk carton. The dairy farm? Eh. 

_Note to self: Check desk first._

The toxicologist ignored both of them.

His replacement smiled weakly; held out a hand to the ponytailed visitor. “It’s nice to meet you…?” 

“Deidara, yeah.” The blond glared. Kabuto’s hand waited. _And it can stay that way. Four-eyed, washed out, needs Just-For-Men interloper._

“Deidara…...?” Kabuto’s probing continued.

“I’m not telling you my surname. I don’t know you like that.” 

A feeble moment more and the hand fell. 

“Ah,” The substitute tox gave another watery smile. “Ah, okay. I—I think I’ll head out for now. (“Won’t hold my breath.”) Akasuna-hakase, you can count on me to keep your lab in tip-top shape while you’re gone. You won’t even be able to tell I’ve been here.” The redhead made no reply. Forgetting the man was best served by not acknowledging his presence to begin with. “Ah, alright. Safe travels.” He turned to Deidara. “And have an, uh, a pleasant evening.” 

“I will, but not because you told me to.” Deidara assured.

The door shut behind Yakushi. (Not with a bang, but with a whimper, yeah.)

“I don’t trust people with dirty glasses.” The blond solemnized. Then he slung his ivy plant over one shoulder and tromped to his friend’s side. _Where was Tobi with his travel chair? Laziest intern on record._ Now he’d have to sprawl on the tile, which was cooollllld. 

“What’d he mean by ‘filling in’? What’s happening?” Deidara looked at the clay lump on the desk. “Is that a finished sculpture? It’s very Brutalist, that’s real vogue right now. You should make more—”

Sasori’s Reinsch Test was finished. 

“—like, what’s the point of that guy? Why’d he say you were going someplace? You’re not going anyplace. I’d know if you were. I’d be going, too. Goddamn, this’s leaking dirt. It’s that weirdo’s fault, yeah. I need some Flex Tape—”

“I’m taking a month’s leave.” Sasori relocated the beaker of nitric acid from his desk to the counter. (This movement took the acid directly over Deidara’s head, but regretfully, none spilled.) “It doesn’t concern you.”

Deidara frowned.

Leaving? Leaving for a month? _(In my Valentino white bag?!?! Whya Whya Wha?!)_

He could only think of one thing that might have prompted this...

It wasn’t that his red-haired friend had a standing habit of removing himself from disagreeable situations—truthfully, there hadn’t existed enough such situations to establish that as a baseline, yeah. It was just that, _usually_ , Sasori was a catalytic factor _facilitating_ chaos. Not a normal human being subject to its mood swings. Being made _entropy’s bitch_. 

Nah, yeah. Sasori was exempt. He was vested by the chaos to pull cold, ruinous strings of judgment. To—for the most part—observe in silence. But when questioned or inconvenienced, of a mind to exact _merciless_ revenge. (Case in point: that self-inflated university thesis chair who’d criticized the man’s benzene ring diagrams. Within a week, the professor’d found his extramarital affair exposed, his car roof-topped, his office swept for illegal substances (which he didn’t possess but were discovered anyway), his tenure lost, his now crucial bus line discontinued, a decade of research controverted, and the succession of four burger-flipping gigs he picked up prematurely ended when each restaurant was beset by rodents and shut down indefinitely, one right after the other.) 

Sasori

was

The Devil.

And it was _fucking amazing,_ yeah.

His friend conspired. His friend wrought. His friend _did not_ **_run away._ **

“This is ‘cause of the pathologist, isn’t it?” Deidara guessed, rubbing a chin still sticky from soda syrup. _Man, I pushed too hard, too fast._ He’d been so stunned by the fact that Sasori had a radar at all, that he’d disregarded the likelihood that the man didn’t know how to use the thing. It was like hearing a toddler recite the alphabet and then immediately expecting them to offer analysis on the Meiji Restoration _._ (Good pottery. Bit landscapey, but of the time). 

“Whatever this is with her, yeah,” The blond man interpreted. _Ease him into the idea._ _Boil the frog._ “It doesn’t even have to be, like, a romantic thing right away.”

(Sasori eyed the bottle of hydrochloric acid on the shelf.)

“—maybe, you’re just finally at the point where you’re ready to have _two_ friends, yeah? Obviously I'm more than enough already! But that’s a bus factor of 1. Who’s gonna be there there to liven up your day if Kakuzu finally makes good on his promise to murder me?

(“If his rates weren’t so exorbitant, we’d have found out by now.”)

“It’s just, the world can change at the drop of a hat, you know? I mean, look—!” Deidara lofted his ivy plant. A leaf fell off. “I’m a father now. Where’d that come from?”

And the blond had had so many ideas! Like how he was going to follow behind them on their first date in his own swan paddle boat. (He’d already told Tobi it was a ride-along assignment, yeah, so he wouldn’t have to be the one pedaling.) But they’d never get there—or to the ice-skating rink, or to that uppity winery in Ame—if Sasori committed seppuku first. 

The red-haired man needed time to process. To come to terms with being (under his breath _“mortal”_ ). 

“Okay. I support you, yeah! You go! Soulseek under the Tanigakure Sun! I’ll hold down the fort.” A second leaf fell off his plant. “And you call me if you need me! Any time, any place. I’ll keep an eye out for unlisted numbers. I know you prefer burner phones.” A third. “This was a good session, yeah. I think we made decent progress today.” Numbers four and five. “Well, we _talked about_ making progress. But that’s also worth celebrating in my opinion.” 

(Sasori contemplated. How sturdily was the reagents shelf bracketed to the wall?)

“Right!” Deidara stood, thoroughly psyched up by his own pep talk. “I’m gonna go slash the Jolly Green Giant’s tires now.” His plant was more a garter snake at this point. “Teamwork makes the dream work!” 

And then the blond departed as rambunctiously as he’d arrived. Leaving in his wake several upended pipettes, a stream of dirt, one Ph.D.-possessing blackhole— 

—and the noseless effigy of the woman upstairs.

Sasori hard shutdown his computer. 

There was nothing of personal value on his desk to clear. No decorations, no keepsakes. Not even a stray eraser. Erasers were for people who made mistakes. 

He didn't have possessions. Neither did he have appetites. No favorite things or favorite places or desires or reveries. Sasori had himself. Had an infinite, inky inwardness. Somewhere to dwell that was wholly his own. And there was an uncanny power in wanting nothing that made him loathe to stray from it. Power in not giving the universe any traction with which to grab hold. In subsisting on nothingness: on a drip diet of solitude and abstention and objectivity. 

It was austere. It was off putting. It was—at least by DSM-5 standards—clinically indicative of a Cluster-A personality disorder. But nothingness suited Sasori. Nothingness rendered him impervious to harm. (And psychology was a soft science, anyway, so those DSM criteria were arbitrary. There were more rigorous guidelines dictating the proportions of meat byproduct in a can of SPAM.) 

_“You’re hollow.”_ Chiyo had said. _“And not in a redeemable, Kinder Egg way. Nu-uh. You’re hollow like a cheap chocolate Easter bunny.”_

But what his grandmother did or said ( _“all sour and bitter and gray”_ ) was inconsequential. Just like his dead father was inconsequential. And his dead mother, as well. Sasori had learned to exorcize the specters of those people who _were,_ who promised and abandoned and then ceased being. To cedar-smudge their memories and learn to do without. Instead of spackling over the holes his parents had left in their wake, he had demolished the structure entirely. Torn it down at the joists and rotohammered the foundation. Those most assailable points just needed an extra strike, an applied force, a joint burial. And the cement went splintering. 

(Shoddy workmanship, all around.)

 _“This—this isn’t very good for home equity,”_ The estate appraiser/youth therapist hazarded. 

But it was. His new intraphysical residence, a basement-shaped hole in the ground where **something** had once stood—extinct things weren’t entitled to names—was irreproachably functional. 

_“Maybe you could advertise it as an inground pool?”_ The next psychologist had proposed. Outlets. Art. “ _Good god, here’s some sculpey, make a dish or a coaster or a paperweight. Purge this.”_ Give shape to the pit.

Only, the pit eluded form. 

His parents were gone. The nothingness that had supplanted them was not. Sasori would never be bereft of the nothingness. 

(Or the sculpey. That had outlasted the psychologist who’d suggested it in the first place. Proved less an artistic outlet than a means of occupying his hands while he waited for assays to incubate. Waiting was unendurable.) 

Sasori turned off the lights.

Did the lock-out procedure on the keypad.

Turned in the doorway.

And came face to face with the pink-haired woman whose image currently water-marked an impermissible number of his thoughts.

“Sorry—are you leaving for the weekend?” She started hesitantly. Her hands were gloved and full of sample containers. “I have kind of a special case,” The woman shifted the weight in her arms. “I was wondering if these could be priority queued? Or if I could help? If that would rush them? Just, if there’s some way to get the results sooner rather than later—”

It was time for him to reset to factory settings. 

“You’re not my problem.” He said.

And all but shouldered past her.

  
  


\------------------------------------------------------------------

  
  


To Sakura’s credit, she waited until the toxicologist had 100% exited the hall to have her outburst.

 _So much for a ceasefire!_ She raged, holding tight to her samples. (She would allow herself five minutes to go absolutely beserk. Clock starts now.) _I showed my neck like prey_ _—_ ** _like prey!_** _—a_ _nd he was still an uptight jerk! It’s not even like it’s the end of the workday_ _—i_ _t’s 3:30. Only Kakashi is sanctioned to commit routine wage theft like this!_

Her Chucks didn’t have the same brute, crushing power of steel-toed boots, but they did an admirable job of stamping the corridor wall nonetheless. 

_Well, Ruroni-Kenshin better watch his back. Because gauntlet thrown. Gloves officially coming off._

(The samples jostled. Agar-agar soaked through sealant tape on one of the petri dishes). 

_Okay!_ Sakura rephrased. _Gloves still on for the next 30 to 40 minutes. But then—_ (so much agar-agar) _—_ ** _then_ ** _he’s officially my nemesis! No holding back. No allowances for sporting obscene eyelashes. You know what else has nice eyelashes? Cars! Those cars with the big fake ones on the headlights!_

She planted her feet. Blew a strand of hair off her heated face.

 _He doesn’t even know the wrath I’m going to rain down on him. It’s going to make the Old Testament blush. It’s going to have movie adaptations that get abysmal scores on parental-review sites. (Oh?) No! Not for that reason! Argh! I mean, like, the Yakuza is going to implement some of these tactics! Girls in junior high will tell horror stories about me. The UN Human Rights Council will be powerless to intervene, because HE’S NOT LEGITIMATELY HUMAN_ _—!_

“Hi Haruno-sensei! Have you seen Deidara-danna around?"

_Evidence? Why, yes, Madam Council President. Several storage units worth—_

"He told me to meet him here, but I can't track him down, even with my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass! Oh,” The intern cocked his head. “Do you need help with those, Haruno-sensei?”

Sakura came back down to Earth.

“Yes, please." She said. ("Jello?" "Growth medium.") "Thank you.”

But inside she was molten.

_He would rue the day._


End file.
